Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

Why would children be handpicking stones outside a giant, Chinese-owned copper-cobalt concession? The best way to understand the situation is to examine the difference between industrial and artisanal mining. Industrial mining is like doing surgery with a shovel artisanal mining is like doing it with a scalpel. During industrial excavation, tons of dirt, stone, and ore are gathered indiscriminately with large machinery, crushed down to pebbles, and processed to extract minerals of value. It is by design a blunt-force, low-yield, high-volume business. Artisanal miners, on the other hand, can use more precise tools to dig or tunnel for high-grade deposits of ore, extract only the ore, and leave the valueless dirt and stones behind. Or, like the children sorting through rubble outside COMMUS, they can simply handpick the stones of value and discard the rest. Artisanal mining techniques can yield up to ten or fifteen times a higher grade of cobalt per ton than industrial mining can. This is the primary reason that many industrial copper-cobalt mines in the DRC informally allow artisanal mining to take place on their concessions, and it is also why they tend to supplement industrial production by purchasing high-grade artisanal ore from depots. COMMUS appeared to have figured out a third option—dump tons of indiscriminate stone and dirt outside their concession and let children handpick the valuable ore.